1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to computer storage and more particularly relates to storage diagnostics.
2. Description of the Related Art
As the density and capacity of computer storage technology continues to grow exponentially, the time required for testing a storage subsystem, even a single hard disk drive in a notebook computer, may become quite lengthy. This may be acceptable for factory testing, but poses a significant problem for customer service in the field.
When a customer calls in to a customer support team and suspects a problem with the hard disk drive it is often a very difficult and lengthy process to determine if a drive is good. It is much simpler to determine if a drive is really bad. If a drive is particularly bad it can be called bad at the first test that fails. To be able to call a drive good requires that one successfully complete all of the possible tests, including a full read scan, which can take hours on large capacity drives. This is an unacceptable length of time and often drives up the No Defect Found (“NDF”) rates (around 30%) because the customer is not willing to wait the hours to determine that the drive is good.
The existing solution is to rely only on a cursory check to decide if the drive is good. The cursory check takes a few minutes and is fairly accurate (around 90%) but there is still another 10% of the bad drives being called good that should have been replaced. The problem is that for this 10% the customer is being told that the drive is good when it is actually bad. It has a large impact on customer satisfaction when they have to call back multiple times for the same problem.